I’ve always thought Joe Biden was an idiot, but that’s probably not true. Anyone who has retained his seat in the Senate through such American upheavals as Reconstruction, Prohibition, World War II and the Cold War probably has some political savvy I’m just not seeing. Dishonest, pandering and completely untrustworthy, yes, but Uncle Joe is probably not as stupid as he looks or sounds.
And as he finally declared his candidacy for president this week, he benefits from comparison with his competitors. The media can pound away at Donald Trump all it wants. The Democrat field is a sinister collection of mountebanks and jesters who want terrorists to vote, borders eliminated, the Constitution neutralized and all your money in government hands.
There’s Bernie Sanders, the last surviving member of the Stalin Fan Club. Pete Buttigieg, who is locked in a heroic battle with the Mike Pence of his imagination. And, of course, Eric Swalwell whose promise to choose a vagina person as running mate was so condescending it reminded me of that song from Annie Get Your Gun: The girl that I run with will have to be as soft and as pink as a nursery…
And then there’s a bunch of people who aren’t white men but none of them is polling much higher than zero.
Compared to this assortment of leftist clowns, Biden has the advantage of merely being a creepy political weather vane with an affable persona and a long record of despicable behavior. He was a serial plagiarist in law school and on the campaign trail, he borked Robert Bork thus bringing the slander of a good man to a fine art, and he abandoned his support for our soldiers in the War on Terror when it became politically inconvenient to stand up for them. Also he lies shamelessly to black people, as when he told them the GOP wanted to “put y’all back in chains,” or when, in his announcement, he repeated the garbage accusation that Donald Trump sympathized with white nationalists at Charlottesville. Also, I don’t care what his apologists say, the way he touches children is icky.
And yet with all that in his record, he still may not be low and ugly enough for the current crop of Dem candidates. Apparently, a few weeks ago, in preparation for his run, he called Anita Hill and apologized to her for once suggesting the burden of proof was on her when she accused a man of minor sexual malfeasance as part of a political ploy to keep a Conservative off the Supreme Court. Hill refused to accept his apology, of course. What sort of a Democrat insists on due process when a court seat is at stake? Biden may have fallen hopelessly behind the utter degradation of his party.
Joe’s is probably the final major entry into the 2020 race and really what a collection of bad people, what a wide array of truly terrible, destructive ideas, the Democrats have assembled. Donald Trump may be Donald Trump with all that implies. But he is not one whit worse than his opponents personally and politically he is surely better at running the country than any of them could ever be. The preening Never Trumpers and our corrupt and hysterical press and the do-nothing Resistance in Congress with their worthless agenda of endless investigations — none of them has done one whit as much for this nation as Trump has.
I don’t say that proudly. Trump’s not my favorite person. But it’s still a binary system, and he’s still the better choice by far.